These speeches will address themselves to the minds
and hearts of those who read them, but not with the
effect they had with those who heard them; Clemens
himself would have said, not with half the effect.
I have noted elsewhere how he always held that the
actor doubled the value of the author’s words;
and he was a great actor as well as a great author.
He was a most consummate actor, with this difference
from other actors, that he was the first to know the
thoughts and invent the fancies to which his voice
and action gave the color of life. Representation
is the art of other actors; his art was creative as
well as representative; it was nothing at second hand.
I never heard Clemens speak when I thought he quite
failed; some burst or spurt redeemed him when he seemed
flagging short of the goal, and, whoever else was
in the running, he came in ahead. His near-failures
were the error of a rare trust to the spontaneity in
which other speakers confide, or are believed to confide,
when they are on their feet. He knew that from
the beginning of oratory the orator’s spontaneity
was for the silence and solitude of the closet where
he mused his words to an imagined audience; that this
was the use of orators from Demosthenes and Cicero
up and down. He studied every word and syllable,
and memorized them by a system of mnemonics peculiar
to himself, consisting of an arbitrary arrangement
of things on a table—knives, forks, salt-cellars;
inkstands, pens, boxes, or whatever was at hand—which
stood for points and clauses and climaxes, and were
at once indelible diction and constant suggestion.
He studied every tone and every gesture, and he forecast
the result with the real audience from its result
with that imagined audience. Therefore, it was
beautiful to see him and to hear him; he rejoiced
in the pleasure he gave and the blows of surprise which
he dealt; and because he had his end in mind, he knew
when to stop.
I have been talking of his method and manner; the
matter the reader has here before him; and it is good
matter, glad, honest, kind, just.
W.
D. Howells.
From the preface to the English
edition of “Mark Twain’s
sketches”
If I were to sell the reader a barrel of molasses,
and he, instead of sweetening his substantial dinner
with the same at judicious intervals, should eat the
entire barrel at one sitting, and then abuse me for
making him sick, I would say that he deserved to be
made sick for not knowing any better how to utilize
the blessings this world affords. And if I sell
to the reader this volume of nonsense, and he, instead
of seasoning his graver reading with a chapter of
it now and then, when his mind demands such relaxation,
unwisely overdoses himself with several chapters of
